A Life of Learning - American Council of Learned Societies

A Life of Learning - American Council of Learned Societies

CHARLES HOMER HASKINS
PRIZE LECTURE FOR 2007
A Life of Learning
Linda Nochlin
ACLS OCCASIONAL PAPER, No.
ACLS
64
The 2007 Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture was
presented at the ACLS Annual Meeting in Montreal,
Quebec, Canada on May 11, 2007.
Published in the United States of America
by American Council of Learned Societies
© 2008 by Linda Nochlin
CONTENTS
On Charles Homer Haskins
iv
Haskins Prize Lecturers
v
Brief Biography of
Linda Nochlin
vi
Introduction
by Pauline Yu
ix
A Life of Learning
by Linda Nochlin
1
Figures
23
ON CHARLES HOMER HASKINS
Charles Homer Haskins (1870-1937), for whom the ACLS lecture
series is named, was the first chairman of the American Council
of Learned Societies, from 1920 to 1926. He began his teaching
career at the Johns Hopkins University, where he received the
B.A. degree in 1887, and the Ph.D. in 1890. He later taught at the
University of Wisconsin and at Harvard, where he was Henry
Charles Lea Professor of Medieval History at the time of his
retirement in 1931, and dean of the Graduate School of Arts and
Sciences from 1908 to 1924. He served as president of the American
Historical Association in 1922, and was a founder and the second
president of the Medieval Academy of America (1926).
A great American teacher, Charles Homer Haskins also
did much to establish the reputation of American scholarship
abroad. His distinction was recognized in honorary degrees from
Strasbourg, Padua, Manchester, Paris, Louvain, Caen, Harvard,
Wisconsin, and Allegheny College, where in 1883 he had begun
his higher education at the age of 13.
iv
HASKINS PRIZE LECTURERS
2007
2006
2005
2004
2003
2002
2001
2000
1999
1998
1997
1996
1995
1994
1993
1992
1991
1990
1989
1988
1987
1986
1985
1984
1983
Linda Nochlin
Martin E. Marty
Gerda Lerner
Peter Gay
Peter Brown
Henry A. Millon
Helen Vendler
Geoffrey Hartman
Clifford Geertz
Yi-Fu Tuan
Natalie Zemon Davis
Robert William Fogel
Phyllis Pray Bober
Robert K. Merton
Annemarie Schimmel
Donald W. Meinig
Milton Babbit
Paul Oskar Kristeller
Judith N. Shklar
John Hope Franklin
Carl E. Schorske
Milton V. Anastos
Lawrence Stone
Mary Rosamond Haas
Maynard Mack
BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF
LINDA NOCHLIN
Linda Nochlin is currently the Lila Acheson Wallace Professor
of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts/New York University,
where she earned her doctorate in Art History in 1963. Prior to
assuming this position, she served as Professor of Art History and
Humanities at Yale University, as Distinguished Professor of Art
History at the Graduate School and University Center of the City
University of New York and as the Mary Conover Mellon Professor
of Art History at Vassar College, her undergraduate alma mater.
She is known widely for her work on Gustave Courbet-a painter
of interest to her since embarking on her doctoral dissertation-as
well as for her seminal publications on Realism, Impressionism
and Post-Impressionism, and, of course, for her ground-breaking
work to advance the cause of women artists, beginning as early
as 1971 with her article, "Why Have There Been No Great Women
Artists?" Sparking a major development in art history and criticism, that early work led to the 1976 exhibition, Women Artists:
1550-1950, which she curated with Anne Sutherland Harris for the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the show was accompanied
by the catalogue of the same title co-authored by both scholars.
Linda Nochlin has written numerous books and articles
focusing attention on social and political issues revealed in the
work of artists, both male and female, from the modernist period
to the present day. Her books Representing Women; The Body in
Pieces; Women, Art, and Power; and The Politics of Vision have
directed and expanded the dialogue among art historians on the
nature of viewing and have broadened the scope of our interpretation of the role of art and artists in society. Throughout her
distinguished career, Nochlin has been the recipient of numerous honors, including the Frank Jewett Mather Prize for Critical
Writing, given by the College Art Association (1977). In 1984-85,
she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has also re-
vi
ceived a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and
was named Scholar of the Year by the New York State Council on
the Humanities (1997). Nochlin has received honorary doctorates
from Colgate University, the Massachusetts College of Art, the
Parsons School of Design and Harvard University. In 1999, she
was granted a Resident Fellowship at the Rockefeller Study and
Conference Center, Bellagio, Italy. That year, she delivered the
Oxford Lectures at Wellesley College on modern portraiture. In
2006, she received one of the three Clark Prizes for Excellence in
Art Writing.
Thirty years after raising the question, Nochlin returned
to the issue of women artists when she presented her paper, "Why
Have There Been No Great Women Artists? Thirty Years Later,"
as part of a conference at Princeton University entitled "Women
Artists at the Millennium." In 2002, she conducted a seminar on
"Realism, Then and Now" at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin.
In the spring of 2004, Nochlin delivered the Norton Lectures
at Harvard University and gave the keynote address, "Speaking of
Pictures," at the American Academy of Arts and Letters Annual
Induction and Award Ceremony.
Linda Nochlin's renown within the intellectual, art historical community is international in scope. She has been invited to
address scholarly audiences in Amsterdam, Paris, London, Berlin,
Ottawa and Hong Kong; her writings have been published in
numerous languages; she has presented lectures at universities
and museums throughout the country and the world on a wide
range of artists and subjects. Nochlin has engaged and collaborated with students, as well as her fellow scholars in the field.
"Self and History: A Symposium in Honor of Linda Nochlin" was
presented at New York University in April of 1999 to acknowledge
her contributions to her students and to the scholarship on modern
art history.
Linda Nochlin is a contributing editor of Art in America.
She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and
of New York University's Institute for the Humanities as well as
the American Philosophical Society.
vii
At the time of the Haskins Prize Lecture, Nochlin was
curating, with Maura Reilly, an exhibition for the Brooklyn
Museum entitled "NeoFeminism," consisting of work by contemporary women artists from around the world.
viii
INTRODUCTION
In the introduction to The Politics of Vision: Essays on NineteenthCentury Art and Society, a volume collecting only a selection of
her work, Professor Linda Nochlin writes: "History, including the
history of one's own production, remains inert without the revivifying touch of the contingent and the circumstantial."
Her observation resonates with the purpose of the Haskins
Prize Lecture. When John William Ward became President of the
American Council of Learned Societies in 1982, he sought to commemorate the ACLS tradition of active engagement in scholarship
and teaching of the highest quality with an annual lecture. Each
year since, we have asked the lecturer:
"... to reflect on a lifetime of work as a scholar, on
the motives, the chance determinations, the satisfactions (and the dissatisfactions) of the life of learning, to
explore through one's own life the larger, institutional
life of scholarship. We do not wish the speaker to present the products of one's own scholarly research, but
rather to share with other scholars the personal process
of a particular lifetime of learning."
This lecture is the twenty-fifth in this series, which is
named for Charles Homer Haskins, the first chairman of ACLS. It
is the responsibility of the Executive Committee of the Delegates
of ACLS to nominate each year's Haskins lecturer. After searching deliberations, the delegates fixed firmly and enthusiastically
on Professor Nochlin as a scholar whose many accomplishments
over a distinguished career tangibly express the values that we
share. The active participle in the title of this lecture series, "A
Life of Learning," is a splendid reminder that the excitement and
pleasures of scholarship lie in the process of ongoing investigation and discovery.
ix
Professor Nochlin's learning changed our knowing. By
posing the deceptively simple question "Why are there no great
women artists?" she effected a critical turn in the long arc of her
discipline, opening up the social history of art.
She is renowned as a welcoming, generous, and supportive mentor. Not surprisingly, her honors include numerous teaching awards, such as that of the College Art Association. She also
has given dedicated service to the public humanities and to civic
art as a member of the New York State Council for the Humanities
and as a member of public art commissions. Her work has been
published not only in scholarly journals, but in publications with
a wider social reach, such as House and Garden.
In the Politics of Vision, Professor Nochlin also writes:
"[E]very art-historical bildungsroman is, in microcosm, a social
history of art history, and deserves examination, however cursory,
in terms of the paradigms within which, or-more rarely-against
which, new art-historical writing is inevitably formulated."
Linda Nochlin transcended and transformed the received
paradigms of her field. We are fortunate that she has sketched for
us her own bildungsroman.
-Pauline Yu, President
American Council of Learned Societies
LINDA NOCHLIN
Not Too Far from Brooklyn:
Growing Up,
Growing Old with Art
My first memories are sounds: the clip-clopping of the milkman's
horse on pavement early in the morning, delivering the Walker
Gordon certified milk to our apartment doorstep, and the reiterated clanging of the trolley cars that framed our block of Crown
Street between Nostrand and Rogers Avenues. Then there were the
street cries: the "I cash, buy old does" of the I Cash Clothes Man
and the ringing of the perambulating knife sharpener. Sometimes,
to my delight, there was the hurdy-gurdy music of the traveling
merry-go-round beneath my windows-not as exciting as the fullscale version in Coney Island but pleasurable nevertheless. These
noise memories are not just there for picturesque effect but to
indicate that I was born much closer to the nineteenth century than
to the twenty-first. Although I do not live in the house in which I
was born, as does the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, I have never
lived more than 75 miles away from where I was born and grew
up. Of course I have traveled-Paris is a second home, London
not far behind. But the furthest away I have lived in the United
States, outside of a brief childhood stay in Tucson and some
winters in Miami Beach (surely a Brooklyn outpost back then),
is Poughkeepsie, New York, where I attended and then taught for
many years at Vassar College. I received my M.A. in seventeenthcentury English literature from Columbia, and my doctorate from
the NYU Institute of Fine Arts, where I now teach. None of these
institutions is very far from Brooklyn.
I grew up in a secular, leftist, intellectual Jewish family,
like so many in the neighborhood. Intellectual achievement,
creation or appreciation of the arts-literature, music, painting,
dance-were considered the highest goals, along with social
justice. I understood that before I understood anything else.
Making money as a goal in life was not looked on with favor,
although it was convenient. Certainly no one ever talked about
money in my presence. That may have been because we had it,
even during the Depression. One grandfather, the literary one,
was an obstetrician/gynecologist; the other, an opera-lover and
inveterate letter-writer to the Times and the Miami Herald, was
the founder and owner of Weinberg News, which delivered all
the newspapers in Brooklyn and some in Manhattan. There was
a house at the beach with two boats, the Linda I and the Linda
II. There were maids, laundresses, and, for my grandparents, a
"couple" to do the housework. One uncle went to Harvard, the
other to Dartmouth, and both my father and my uncle attended the
Peddie School, where they were definitely a tiny Jewish minority,
and from which my father was bounced, probably for drinking.
Far from being a source of alienation, Jewishness was a
universal identity in our part of Crown Heights. Everyone we knew
was Jewish, mostly secular and assimilated, though some were
"old-fashioned" (kosher and religious), black-hatted men whom
my elegant, modernist grandfather clearly looked down on. I
never entered a Jewish temple before attending, at the age of 13, a
cousin's very reformed bar mitzvah in Forest Hills, which I found
boring and slightly embarrassing. I still find the sight of people,
of whatever denomination, praying in public-on their knees,
especially-vaguely disturbing. Yet the old country, oppression,
the shtetl, Yiddish-the language, the theater, the jokes-and the
tragic fate of the Jews in Europe were always in the background,
and ultimately, during the war, in the foreground, if one looked
for them. I didn't know that Jews were different or what it meant
to be a Jew until I went to Vassar; I experienced this more deeply
on my first trip abroad at 17, when I wrote "At Merton College,
Oxford,"' a poem exploring my discovery of Jewish identity, which
was published in Commentary in winter 1950.
Reading was the drug of choice in my childhood circle
and I must emphasize the overwhelming importance of the book,
mainly the novel, in my intellectual and emotional formation.
A "play date" consisted of two little girls curled up in adjacent
armchairs, reading. I often stayed up all night reading a book:
Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens or Kristin Lavransdatter or
Buddenbrooks or Dombey and Son. I read with fascination Dr.
Faustus, which explained artistic genius as a rare disease afflicting the normal human herd. This seemed a rational explanation
to me, perhaps because, whether consciously or not, I somehow
knew that my unquenchable thirst for the products of this genius
had some of the same excessive, but by no means completely
inimical, disease-like qualities and marked me as chosen. My
reading, then, was out of control, something I had to do whenever
possible and sometimes when it really wasn't. I ate dinner with
Freud's Interpretationof Dreams in my lap, unconvincingly veiled
by my grandmother's vast white linen napkin. I listened to Jack
Benny or Fred Allen on the radio-a family requirement-to "rest
my eyes" with the book on my lap still, feverishly discovering
why, in a dream, of course, prostitutes had to wear blue stones
in their ears.
Did my friend Alice really call me at 2 a.m. so that I could
translate the French sentences exchanged by Clavdia Chauchat
and Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain, which we were reading
simultaneously with flashlights in our own bedrooms? I had
already started French and she was taking Latin. Thus we "did"
The Magic Mountain at the age of 12 in about a day of continuous reading. The book, like many others I read before there was
too much to interfere with its total absorption, is seared into my
brain. I still imagine that I remember parts of it perfectly.
But how could you understand The Magic Mountain at
12, one might reasonably ask? I understood everything; I skipped
nothing. Everything in the book was of equal, passionate, undeviating interest. Yes, I understood everything, and better than
I would if I read it today for the first time, because back then
I knew nothing of life that would interfere with the pure literary matter, the transparent narrative provided by the text. In the
absence of worldly experience-of love, of illness, of European
history, of philosophy-the text and the act of reading the text
were all there were. Thus I understood, or rather, participated
in Clavdia and Hans's love affair and its ironies far better than I
would have if I had ever had any love affairs of my own. I would
have projected my own experience of love on to the text if I had
ever loved; this way I understood it purely, without the corruption offered by a "personal" view.
The same was true of the great Naphta-Settembrini debate
at the end of the book, which I drank in with feverish intensity. I
knew what they were arguing about: it seemed perfectly clear, a
perfect opposition. Unburdened by the discourses of either nineteenth-century liberalism or Nietzschean conservatism, I could
nevertheless tell that the stakes in this game were high, the intellectual duel world-class.
I went on to read all of Mann but the Joseph series, picking the books one by one off the shelves of the Brooklyn Public
Library at Grand Army Plaza: Lotte in Weimar, Buddenbrooks
(twice), Tonio Kroger (which I desired to be part of so much that
I drew Tonio, lying on a chaise longue in a shadowy Biedermeier
setting, surrounded by books, holding a drooping rose in his
ascetic fingers). Mann's short stories were particular favorites
of my mothers, especially "Disorder and Early Sorrow," with its
special view of disrupted childhood. My mother liked any fiction
that claimed the child's point of view: when I had the flu at eight
years old, she read to me the opening passages of Portraitof the
Artist, in which Joyce's hero listens to animal noises. She also
introduced me to the two Katherines: Katherine Ann Porter's Pale
Horse, Pale Rider and Katherine Mansfield's "At the Bay," both of
which were child-centered. Mann's "The Blood of the Walsungs"
was my own particular favorite; it was so dark and seductive,
velvety in its literary texture: I certainly knew of Siegmund and
Sieglinde as a pair of infinitely sophisticated, sleek, dark-haired
Jewish twins in Weimar Germany before I knew them as Wagnerian characters. I don't think I read Death in Venice until a little
later: it is a pity for the book is a climax, a kind of allegory of
ideas of childhood and authorship, and the terrible and immense
4
yearning to possess the unpossessable world of the text that filled
me in those days. I am sure I would have made a drawing of
Tadzio if I had read Death in Venice early enough.
My grandfather steered me towards the Russians: Gogol,
Tolstoy, Dostoievsky of course, but also Ivan Bunin, Chekov,
Turgenieff-SpringFloods and Fathersand Sons. But he was eclectic in his tastes, ranging from Lord Dunsany to James Farrell to
Stefan Zweig to dramatists like O'Neill and Ibsen. Knut Hamson
was a particular favorite of both my grandfather and his bohemian Yiddish writer friend, Nahum Yeud, who later turned up,
much to my surprise, as a character in Henry Miller's Tropic of
Cancer. At 13 and 14, I discussed books with them on an equal
basis; I had read them, after all, and had my opinions on plots
and characters, so why not?
I somehow thought of literature as foreign, not part
of my Brooklyn daily life. Being English or French seemed an
unfair advantage of those literary peers: Jules Romain's Parisian
lyciens in their closed secret world of intellect, politics and
intrigue filled me with jealously, as did Elizabeth Bowen's Death
of the Heart, which featured a kid like me in such interesting,
grown-up circumstances. How could she be so lucky-and
English to boot? (To be English was the height of unattainable
desirability.) Gide's Counterfeiters was a paradigm of everything
of which I felt myself deprived: evil, refinement, self-consciousness, and self-confidence.
So Delmore Schwartz came as a revelation: as I read
Genesis, his long 1942 bildungsroman in prose and verse, a sense
of my own identity came into being along with that of the young
hero (and surrogate for the author) Hershey Green, who was a
Jewish kid like myself with a mind nourished by poetry and
fiction like my own. Schwartz's style, deliberately shifting back
and forth between formal diction and colloquial speech, became
a characteristic of my own verse style. Even the incongruity of
the names in his work struck a sympathetic chord-above all,
Shenandoah Fish, hero of the verse play, Shenandoah. How like
it was to Delmore Schwartz's own name-half Anglo, half echt
Jewish-and my name, Linda Weinberg. Suddenly, I could talk of
the matibre de Brooklyn, my home, as though it were the stuff of
enchanted London or Paris or Moscow-it too could be the material of high imagination, of literature.
I did do other things besides read: I roller-skated, jumped
rope, took ballet lessons and modern dance, went to camp (where
I was something of an athlete) in the summer, learned to iceskate, and of course took piano lessons, which were de rigueur
for Brooklyn youth at the time. My piano teacher, who had been
my mother's piano teacher, said: "All my pupils are successful,
but none of them as pianists." Bach was all I wanted to play. I
went down to Florida clutching my beloved-breakable-BachStokowski records in my arms in the upper berth. I am still
devoted to Bach; I listen to his music at least an hour a day and
take piano lessons so I can play the Inventions-that's about as
far as I can get now, but they still seem as fresh and surprising as
ever. And I liked folk music, too, getting Alan Lomax records from
the Library of Congress, tracing Child Ballads-the old English
versions-and comparing them with the Cecil Sharp versions
from the Appalachians. I learned a lot of folk songs, in several
languages, from listening to the records over and over againand I still sing them in the shower or on long rides or when I've
had too much to drink. I learned how to write sonnets in Miami
Beach when I was 13 or 14, from my grandparents' Complete Book
of English Verse. The first I came across were Spenserian, so that
was the model I used for my early efforts, like "Bach, there are
those who think that passion springs ... " a scathing iambic pen-
tameter denunciation of anyone who dared like romantic music,
and a sonnet-like poem Juvenalesque in tone, about the inevitable
fall of Miami Beach. It began with description:
I've set a frame against the sky
To see what it will hold,
And in the right hand corner
Is a burning ball of gold.
Down near the bottom of the frame
Pale stucco houses stand
6
With gay vermilion awnings
Like stage sets on the sand
And ends with rhetorical prophecy:
Oh fair, fantastic city!
When will your time be past?
Yes, Rome endured for centuries
But Rome was built to last.
How soon the cardboard castles,
the fairy city must
fade into misty twilight
And lie fallen in the dust.
Not too bad for a 14-year-old, but how wrong I was! No
fading into twilight, or falling into dust, either. More than half
a century later, the city flourishes, more artificial than ever, its
level of chic and cool and over-the-top extravagance far beyond
anything dreamed of by the builder Morris Lapidus in the 1940s,
and its Jewish presence, so dominant in the '40s and '50s, now
fallen in relation to the Latino presence and that of models, artists, gay and straight hunks, and other assorted jet-setters.
And what about art, you may wonder? Here I am, an aged
art historian, and I haven't yet said anything about the place of
art in my youthful formation. Certainly I never, in my early days,
even dreamt of being an art historian or even knew such a thing
existed, except perhaps vaguely from my uncle who had gone
to the Fogg. I became an art historian more or less by accident.
After getting my M.A. in seventeenth-century English literature
at Columbia, I received a call from the head of the Vassar Art
Department, Agnes Claflin, asking me whether I would replace the
youngest member who was leaving to get married. I had nothing
better to do, and I had greatly enjoyed my four undergraduate
courses in the subject, so I said yes. After a year, I could see
that art history suited me, so I decided to get my doctorate at the
Institute of Fine Arts, a long commute that ended with a Ph.D.
in 1963, a professorship, and eventually an endowed chair at my
alma mater, which I finally left for the CUNY Graduate Center,
in 1980.
7
But from an early age, I did draw and paint avidly and
was said to be "talented," not an unusual label in Brooklyn in
those days. I enrolled myself in the Class for Talented Children at
the Brooklyn Museum, where I also visited on school field trips
and with my mother or grandfather, and which certainly played
a major role in my artistic formation, although not necessarily in
an aesthetic way. I was, first of all, fascinated by the objects in the
museum: their age, their reminders of distant or vanished civilizations. This aspect of the museum experience inspired my first
ambitious attempt at epic verse, in 1944, when I was 13. The poem
in question was called "The Ghosts of the Museum," and began
portentously: "We are the ghosts of the past, the dead reincarnate." It spoke from the position of the objects in the museum:
We are the snuff-boxes, the fans, the lace shawls,
the mummy cases
costumes once the height of fashion,
We are the jewel hilted daggers
the yellow-leafed hour books ...
I am an onyx jar that held the eye-black of a princess ...
The Egyptian princess especially inspired me to flights of
free verse. I really believed that in sneaking a feel of her mummy
case I was somehow directly, mystically, in touch with the distant
past-but a distant past that included someone like me-a young
girl, after all-and the experience was a decisive one. I ended on
a darker hortatory note:
Know this, you yawning, shuffling scornful moppets
That in one short minute of eternity
Your compacts and cigarette cases,
Your bracelets and silk stockings,
Razors and can-openers,
Will be here with us
Passing living death in glass cases ...
While the men of another era
Yawn and shuffle
Through the damp, musty halls of the museum.
8
An effet pervers, this: the museum and the museum
experience itself made me realize that I too was a part of history. I
had unwittingly become a self-conscious subject of the historical
experience. Perhaps it is not an accident, then, that my kind of
art history is explicitly object-oriented. Certainly, the aesthetics
and the formal language of art are important to me, but it is the
history and theory of things that I am engaged with: they remain
the primary objects of my attention.
My first memory concerning myself and visual imagery,
however, was one of iconoclasm, or one might say, unconscious
protofeminist critique. I must have been about six years old when
I performed this act of desecration. Slowly and deliberately, I
poked out the eyes of Tinkerbell in an expensively illustrated edition of Peter Pan with a compass. I still remember my feeling of
excitement as the sharp point pierced through those blue, longlashed orbs. I hoped it hurt, and I was both frightened and triumphant looking at the black holes in the expensive paper. I hated
Tinkerbell-her weakness, her sickening sweetness, her helplessness, her pale hair, her plea for the audience's approval, and her
wispy, evanescent body, so different from my sturdy plump one.
I was glad I had destroyed her baby blues. (I now realize that I
had, in effect, repeated the act of Mary "Slasher" Richardson, the
militant suffragette who had attacked Velasquez's Rokeby Venus
in the National Gallery with a meat cleaver to protest the arrest of
Emmeline Pankhurst.)
I continued my campaign of iconoclasm with my first
grade reader: Linda and Larry it was called, and Larry was
always the leader in whatever banal activity the two were called
on to perform. "See Larry run. See Linda run. Run, Larry, run.
Run, Linda, run .. ." etc. Larry was always at least three paces
ahead of Linda, as well as being a head taller. I successfully
amputated Larry's head with a blunt scissors on one page of the
reader and cut off his legs in another; now they were equal, and I
was satisfied. (Freudians can make of this what they will.) These
very deliberate acts of desecration were propelled not so much by
rage as by a fierce sense of injustice. Why were girls and women
depicted as poofy, pretty, helpless weaklings, and men as doughty
leaders and doers?
Do not imagine that I was a precocious man-hater, far
from it. Among my favorite books were Booth Tarkington's marvelous Penrod series, and the wonderful Otto of the Silver Hand,
written by Howard Pyle and illustrated by him with shady, Dureresque engravings. I read Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, with
its strictly male cast of characters, three times in a row. What I
hated was not men-my beloved grandfather was the one who
most encouraged me in my intellectual and artistic pursuits-but
rather the visual putting down of girls and women vis a vis a
power situation existing in both high and popular culture, and I
resorted to extreme measures when confronted by it.
Yet my career as an early feminist art critic was sadly
or happily flawed by contradictions. (My life, like most people's,
is rife with contradiction and I approve of this condition, or at
least accept it with good grace.) At eight or nine, I pored over
my uncle's Esquire magazines (not the Harvard uncle!), gazing
enraptured at the smooth, airbrushed contours of the scantily
dressed, salaciously posed Petty and Varga girls, curvy pin-ups
with large conical breasts and exaggerated bottoms, always
wearing the highest of heels and the lowest of decolletis. I knew
there was something forbidden about them, though I didn't know
exactly what sex as an entity was. But it wasn't their breasts or
their backsides that really got to me, but rather their feet-those
preternaturally high arches, smooth, round, perfect semi-circles
uplifted on towering heels. I drew them again and again, as
though I could capture some of their manna by the act of drawing them, just as I drew the Vogue models in my grandmother's
fashion magazines.
At exactly the same time, and for not such different
reasons, I was seduced by the reproduction of Jean Fouquet's
Virgin of Melun (Agnes Sorel as the Virgin) (fig. 1) in our Treasury
of Art Masterpieces (one of the first luxe books of reproductions
in serious color). The painting is a fetish-image if ever there was
one, with the worldly and fashionable Queen of Heaven's bulging
10
white breast protruding over her tightly-laced bodice, her rounded,
bare forehead (like the Petty girls' insteps?) domed under an
elegant, spiky golden crown, and her entourage of bright, scarlet
angels splitting out of their skin-tight breeches like little gods
of erection. Here, too, I knew there was something forbiddenI couldn't take my eyes off that white breast, those red thighs.
And this too was part of the education of an incipient feminist,
this sexualized rotundity and expansion that I couldn't quite get
a grip on but that fascinated me in its visual expression, and
which nobody seemed to want to talk about or explain. In these
images, women were depicted as powerful by male artists, but
more because of what they were than because of what they didor rather, more because of how they looked than what they did.
The Brooklyn Museum was a source of constant instruction-for the usual reasons of course, but also because its art
works provided access to the naked human body in all its varieties
in ways that no other source of the period did. The National
Geographic provided "Native" breasts, but they were usually
flaccid and uninteresting, and my grandfather's Medical Journal
showed naked bodies-the eyes blacked out by a little strip of
censorship-with quite wonderful sores and scabs and stitches,
but not quite what one was after. Instead, the park, the bus, the
movie theater, and sometimes the apartment-house roof were
places where little Brooklyn girls found out about bodies-or
at least the forbidden parts of the male body. Masturbaters and
exposers abounded in those days now nostalgically denominated
as "good old days" or "safer times." We girls called these mildmannered deviants "fiends" and divided them up quite systematically by habitat. "Subway fiends" lingered, rubbed, and unzipped
in the secluded corridors at the ends of subway cars. Bus fiends
were more devious, though often merely eccentric and smelly,
like the mumbling, bulbous-nosed old boy, hung with onions and
mysterious small bundles, feet wrapped in rags, who sometimes
boarded the Nostrand Avenue trolley on the way home from high
school. Movie fiends were a dime a dozen, sometimes going so
far as to attempt a stealthy touch under cover of darkness, but
usually content to massage themselves and breathe heavily in
11
solitude. Roof fiends were a more mythic breed: voyeurs who
stationed themselves on the building next door at undressing
time. One was reputed to have put his hand straight through the
open window to pull up the shade, revealing the girl in question
stark naked-but I never knew the girl this happened to.
Park fiends in Prospect Park or the Botanic Gardens were
more variable: timid and middle-aged on the whole, they could
turn aggressive and nasty and follow their victims to lonely
places. My best friend and I, contrary to a fault, decided that we
should turn the tables, stalk our chosen park fiend, and give him
a good scare. We actually did this one lovely spring afternoon:
we followed our persecutor through the Gardens and "cornered"
him at the end of an open field just when the Gardens were
about to close at sunset. Then, according to plan, we flung roses
(illegally picked) at him, turned, and ran for our lives. This gave
us immense satisfaction and we built up the incident into a protofeminist triumph, telling our audience and ourselves how scared
he had been, how surprised: the look on his face when we hurled
the roses! Actually, we never had a chance to see the look on his
face-we were running away too fast! Yet the museums-in my
case, the Brooklyn and the Metropolitan, as well as the Frick,
and later the Museum of Modern Art-also gave us bodies in
quantity and quality: breasts, penises, backsides, and everything
in between.
The museum was also a theater of cruelty, and children
are both repelled by and fatally attracted to violence and crueltyeverything from Grimm's fairy tales to today's violent television
speaks to this fact. In the museum, you could contemplate an
African statue (fig. 2) with glass in his belly and nails profusely
stuck into his skin (it was one of my favorites); or, in reproduction, Saint Erasmus' bowels torn out by an ingenious machine
(fig. 3); or Saint Agatha's breasts cut off and served up on a silver
tray (fig. 4)-without a guilty conscience. They were art, after
all, not low-class horror films. Then, of course, there was "The
Museum Without Walls," just coming into full-colored splendor
in Thomas Craven's History of Art Masterpieces. It was there I first
saw Grunewald's Isenheim Altar Crucifixion (fig. 5), an image so
12
horrific I hardly dared look at it, the thrilling effect of the greenish, bruised, tortured body of Christ on the cross doubly verboten
to a Jewish child of the Enlightenment like me. That image stayed
with me over the years and was the subject of my first published
book, Mathis at Colmar: A Visual Confrontation (Red Dust Press,
1963). This essay was the result of sitting in front of the Isenheim
Altarpiece for five days and writing about what I saw and felt,
without scholarly constraint or rational limitation.
Later, in high school, a favorite hangout was the old
Guggenheim, where the non-objective paintings were hung at
floor level, and one could settle in to do homework to the strains
of Bach or late Beethoven quartets. We learned early to discriminate between the Bauers-not good, despite the glowing encomiums provided on request by Hilla Rebay, the director-and the
Kandinskys-good, a high point of modernism. The old Whitney
was famed in my set for the excellence of its bathrooms as well
as its art, and the Frick was where I fell in love with Bellini's
St. Francis in the Desert (fig. 6) and its combination of vast, layered spaciousness and obsessive detail-the sandals, the rock
formation, the book stand, and the adorable donkey in the middle ground representing, I thought, St. Francis's admirable love
of animals. I pretended that the enclosed conservatory was my
very own-easy to do on weekdays when attendance was very
low and one might indeed be the only person in residence. At
the height of our medieval period, my friend Paula and I would
make the long subway pilgrimage from the President Street
station in Brooklyn to the Cloisters on Sunday mornings for the
medieval music concerts in the garden, or "hortus conclusus" as
we liked to think of it. This was during and right after the War,
and Washington Heights was the only point of reference offered
to two girls fixated on the glory of the Middle Ages.
High school was also when we became regulars at the
Museum of Modern Art (reputed in some circles as a place to pick
up boys, although I never had any luck in that direction). There
was of course the film program: it was one of the few places
one could see foreign or vanguard movies: Cocteau's "Blood of a
Poet" and Maya Deren's "Meshes of the Afternoon" were standard
13
repertory; I learned to speak scornfully of Hollywood, although I
lapped up its products all the same. I remember being transfixed,
like all others of my age, by Pavel Tchelitchew's Hide and Seek
(fig. 7), strategically set at the top of the stairs, a large and striking
canvas, with lots of hidden imagery to search out, and, for very
different reasons, being enchanted by Morris Graves, an almost
forgotten but then very popular Northwest coast mystic, whose
birds of the inner eye (fig. 8) were small and modest in scale, but
lyrical and mysterious. And I, like all my friends, was awed and
moved by Picasso's Guernica (fig. 9). It was a kind of shrine, a
religious experience for a leftist kid like me, who as a small child
had attended rallies for the Loyalists, had read Man's Hope and
seen "The Spanish Earth," and could sing all the words of "Viva
la Quince Brigada" and "Los Quatros Generales." I remember also
being swept away by other Picassos-Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
(fig. 11), in particular. Quite honestly, I don't remember that there
was ever a time when I was disturbed, put off by, or even questioned, the so-called "distortions" or "ugliness" of modern art,
or its abstracted, unrecognizable subjects. That was simply what
art was for me: it was something I was trying out in my own art
classes. The notion that art was a formal language and that its
shapes, colors and structures were as important to its meaning
as its content seemed obvious, natural as it were, by the time I
was in high school. Modernism seemed to me to be the art of our
times and I responded to it as such: when I painted a portrait of
my mother, it was Matisse who inspired the flattened forms and
the decorative background; resemblance seemed secondary and
even trivial.
Then of course, I left Brooklyn for Vassar. Vassar is an
institution with a serious feminist past and a history of brilliant,
creative, and often politically activist students like Elizabeth
Bishop, Muriel Rukeyser, and Mary McCarthy. But in the late '40s
it succumbed, in part, to the general postwar demand that women
return to kinder, kirche, kuche. A well publicized survey team of
sociologists, psychologists, and educational authorities, known
as the Mellon Committee, diminished the women students'
ambition and potential for achievement by declaring the college a
14
"homosexual matriarchy" and women who dared to use their
minds in competition with men as "overachievers."
Yet here again, contradiction-fortunately-abided. In
the classroom, our teachers-the better ones, male and femaleencouraged us to strive, to explore, to excel, even if nothing much
awaited most of us after graduation but marriage, parenthood,
and membership in the Junior League of St. Louis or Scranton.
For a term paper in my junior-year social psych course, I decided
to do a so-called "content analysis" of the women's magazines of
the period-Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, and The
Woman's Home Companion-thereby enabling myself to read in
good conscience what I usually felt guilty about as time-wasting.
(I must admit that now, as then, this feminist intellectual enjoys the occasional wallow in the sluttish pleasures of popular
culture.) My analysis uncovered the double message women's
magazines of the late '40s sent to their readers: on the one hand,
there were the serious articles about major women activists and
achievers like Eleanor Roosevelt, Dorothy Thompson, and Amelia
Earhart, presumably calculated to encourage their readership to
do likewise. But the fiction they offered for female consumption
told a different story: without exception, women who pursued
careers, who didn't pay full attention to husbands and children
and domestic affairs, were doomed and punished. Career girls
who wanted to keep on working and women artists or writers
who dared to compete with male partners were cast into outer
darkness-either they remained "Old Maids" or lost their mates
to properly domesticated women. The message was clear, and
cast in the guise of fiction, it appealed to the emotions and even
the unconscious fears and doubts of the female audience.
Such fiction, like similar women's films, reinforced the
doxa of the day, and no doubt helped sell more houses, more washing machines, and more table linen to the readership of would-be
model housewives and helpmeets. It also opened my eyes to my
still hypothetical future. Although by no means a card-carrying
feminist-and who was in those days, besides some shapeless,
tweedy, old left-over suffragettes among the emeritae?-I knew
from that time onward that I was not going to be one of those
15
model domestic women. I despised them or pitied them, and
vowed inwardly that I would be different. Of course there were
other models for heterosexual women on view at the collegebohemian wives and mothers, or, in rare cases, married female
instructors-but their fate was almost too awful to contemplate:
women trying to finish their dissertations, write their poetry, or
paint their pictures amid a shambles of urine-soaked diapers, unwashed dishes, and uncontrollable children. No indeed.
Instead, I commuted to the Institute of Fine Arts (where
I now teach) to pursue my doctorate, taught at Vassar, married,
had a daughter, and spent a crucial Fulbright Year in Paris in
1958-59. I was still not totally convinced about being an art
historian when I went to Paris. I worked in the morning on
Courbet, my dissertation topic. Courbet, with his unique combination of stylistic innovation and political engagement, is still a
majorinterest, and a volume of my essays devoted him was just
published (Courbet, Thames & Hudson, 2007). But in the afternoon, I worked on an experimental novel tentatively called Art
and Life. I diligently kept a notebook on the order of Gide's in the
Fauxmonnayeurs, a book I had read before but which came to life
for me in Paris. I used it in my own novel, which lies, still a handwritten manuscript, in a box in my bedroom. The central part
of the novel, later published as Mathis at Colmar, was my trip to
Colmar to see the Isenheim Altarpiece. How I envied those
students on the rue d'Ulm! I remember thinking that I wanted "my
footsteps to ring out on the pavements of Paris." What I envied was
the free life of those young male students-free personally and
intellectually. I was a young mother with a dissertation to write,
but I was trying to forge my own freedom on my own terms. That
year in Paris was essential not only to my cultural developmentthe museums, going to the Comidie, the Cinamathque, reading
the nouveau roman (which was brand new at the time), adoring
Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet-but to my sense of how I wanted to
live, who I wanted to be.
Still, my friends and I were isolated, and confused in
attempting to stake out a meaningful future. It was not until 1969
and the mass impulsion of the Women's Liberation Movement,
16
with its sub-organization, the Women's Art Movement, that my
feminist impulses assumed a coherent, conscious, coordinated,
and, eventually, an institutional formulation both activist and
theoretical. To those of you who have not read my piece "Starting
from Scratch" in the excellent anthology The Power of Feminist
Art, edited by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, I recommend
that you do so, because it is hard to believe, in 2007, either the
situation of ambitious women like myself or the institutional,
theoretical, or self-imposed obstacles that stood in our way. In
that essay, I describe my reading of the early texts of the Woman's
Liberation movement-Off Our Backs, Red Stockings Newsletter,
etc.-as a kind of epiphany that I experienced like Saul/Paul on
the road to Damascus, waking me up to a new light of personal
and social awareness and the power of communal action.
Women artists formed groups to show their work; women
academics shared consciousness-raising sessions and changed
the subjects of their classes to include feminist material. I taught
the first "Woman and Art" class at Vassar in 1969 and wrote
"Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" shortly after.
No matter how individual and unique we wanted to be, it seemed
clear that power-and change of the status quo-lay in group
action. Women-artists included-have historically won attention
by being spectacular exceptions: women artists like Mme. VigdeLebrun in the eighteenth century for painting women's portraits;
Rosa Bonheur in the nineteenth century for being an unusual
woman "animalibre"; Georgia O'Keeffe, without any doubt one
of the best known artists in the United States, with a plethora of
calendars and posters to prove it, for being a female modernist
in the twentieth century. But not until the Women's Movement
of the '70s was there an attempt-a mostly successful one-to
reframe and recast the whole conception of artists-or doctors or
lawyers-and to insist that women artists were an integral element of the art world, with all that it implies. Women artists are
no longer "exceptions," brilliant or not, but part of the rule. That
is the point of the feminist project, and a point which still needs
to be made in parts of the world where the feminist struggle is
still engaged with securing the most basic rights for women.
17
We live in contradiction: that is what becomes clearer
and clearer to me as I get older. I am, on the one hand, the most
aesthetic of creatures: my appetite for high art is unappeasable.
When I saw the recent Velasquez show in London, I can assure
you that I and my feminist friends did not, like "Slasher" Mary
Richardson, think of taking an axe to the remarkable work on
view; rather, looking at the miraculous squiggles of white-edged
painted brocade close up, we thought of the resemblance to the
work of Eva Hesse. When I had myself painted into Manet's Bar
at the Folies Bergere by feminist artist Kathleen Gilge, it was because I wanted to be there, at the heart of that painting, looking
out of it and at the same time being in it, a fantasy come true. I
try to practice Bach an hour a day, I write sonnets and odes for
relaxation. The ballet and modern dance make life complete. But
I also drown myself in TV detective shows, and love nice clothes,
playing with my cats, having silly fun with family or friends at
dinner parties. I have never-especially now that I am old-felt
the compulsion to impose a spurious unity upon myself. Indeed,
more and more, I feel myself to be many selves-a woman, a
Jew, a scholar, a feminist, a mother and grandmother, a teacher,
an athlete, a friend, a passionate devourer of printed matternot necessarily connected. I am more and more convinced that
"inner life" has no meaning for me: my life is exterior, lived on
the surface of experience, devoted to the world and the things in
it, for better or for worse. As I get older, I feel closer and closer
to my early life, my Brooklyn youth and childhood, and that is
why I have spent so much time recalling it, for I am still in many
ways that child. Far from rejecting my cultural "heritage" or
background, I am very much a product of my early environment,
of the ideals I learned in my youth, of the beliefs-in art, culture
democratically available to all, justice and fairness-that, almost
without knowing it, I breathed in with my education, especially
my elementary education at the Brooklyn Ethical Culture School.
Not for me the casting off of bigotry, vulgarity, or emotional deadness that so many American bildungsromans have featured, or
the hostility of the environment to the artist or intellectual in
some European ones.
I can also affirm that as an effect of my early environment, I have not a religious bone in my body. Neither institutional
religion nor more vaguely defined forms of spirituality have ever
appealed to me: the furthest I have gone in that direction was a
brief encounter with Simone Weil during my first year in college,
but I admired her brilliance and human courage rather than her
adopted Catholicism. Anything not human, not social, not part
of the human will and imagination, simply does not exist, as far
as I am concerned. "The Art of the Fugue," Manet's Olympia, or
Shakespeare's Tempest are as transcendent as experience can get,
and they exist as products of human beings in the material world,
created by and available to human intellect and emotion. I marvel
that people-so many people-can believe in flying saucers, a
benevolent god, miracles, devils, the redemptive power of suffering. I understand how religion can provide a social centering,
community, an enabling sense of tradition. But the supernatural?
Bah, humbug.
What does it mean to the future self to be, on the whole,
so rooted, so protected, so cherished and supported as a child,
so-seemingly, at any rate-at home in the world? The flip side
of rootedness is complacency, a kind of existential smugness
that denies to others-the exiled, the alienated, the uprooted,
the disenfranchised, the majority of the human race-their right
not merely to angst or estrangement, but to a place at the table
alongside the more fortunate. As a Jew, especially, I call myself
to order: only through luck, sheer chance, am I who I am and
not another; am I alive at all. All my grandparents' relatives who
stayed in Europe instead of emigrating were, of course, wiped
out during the World War II. Then too, it is well to be aware that
life and the passage of time eventually tear up your roots even as
you cling to them. The protective family dies off, one by onegrandparents, parents, relatives, husbands. On the other hand,
travel and mutual interest has greatly expanded my range of
friends, acquaintances and colleagues far beyond the close-knit
little world I was born into. Children, grandchildren, students
and former students, friends and colleagues, many of them artists, in increasing numbers have changed the focus from roots
19
to shoots-offshoots leading to the future rather than the past.
And even though it is true that I have never lived for long more
than 75 miles from New York, New York and Brooklyn itself have
changed radically over the years. Who would have thought that
Brooklyn, rather than the Village, would be the home of aspiring
artists or writers today?
Being old gives me the impetus to concentrate on my
passions more ferociously than ever. Being a feminist, although
an abiding concern, is not a full time occupation. Still, my
passion for justice for women is perhaps my strongest passion of
all, and a lasting one: justice for all women, everywhere. I do not
feel obliged to love all women, to like them, or to know them. I
no more feel that all women are my sisters than I feel all men are
my brothers. Justice is not the same as love or fellow feeling. But
I do feel obligated, within a more restricted domain, to support or
speak out for the women artists I like or who arouse my interest,
and to teach and disseminate the work of feminist art historians
and art critics, who believe, as I do, that art history and criticism
are critical practices.
I do not feel that old age confers wisdom: on the contrary, one must be alert to intellectual hardening of the arteries,
to closing down and shutting out, to clinging to worn out verities
and outmoded cliches. I have always preferred youthful stylesdiscovery, invention, experimentation-to old-age ones with their
blurry universality and softened generalization of form and content. Grand finales, unifying summaries are not my thing-give
me fragmentation, recalcitrance, contradiction, the beneficent jolt
of the unexpected and the antagonistic. That is what I ask of
life-and that it continue, of course.
20
ENDNOTES
1.
At Merton College, Oxford
(1948-1949)
By Merton's darkening walls I sat
Brushed by the fall of summer's rain,
Feeling the eternal Jew
Homunculus, starting in my veins.
Now in the garden of the mind
Blooms the dark vintage of my race;
No memory binds me to its vine,
Yet shattering time unlocks the gate.
By Toledo's walls I wept,
(Drinking my tea and milk the while)
Under the flame-pierced sky of Spain
Bound to the burning stake, I smiled.
No cymbals clash, no sparrow falls,
I sip, I talk, I choose a cake;
Where is the writing on the wall?
When shall the stone of silence break?
Through Vilna's icy lanes I fled,
Safe in the dark shroud of dismay;
But the bright star shining on my head
No summer's rain shall wash away.
On Erudition's arm I walk
Past the stern guardian of the right,
Blazing with borrowed wit, I talk
Of Plato, Augustine and Christ.
With lowered eyes I phrase the Greek,
Sharpen the point in flawless French;
What dark-voweled language did I speak
Rocking with wisdom on my bench?
21
Once in a city's arms I dreamed
But Oxford's towers have pierced my sleep;
A midnight voyage on the seaNow by Babylon's waters I weep.
Destruction's sheltering touch at last
In passive union binds all men;
Still the destructive tongue of brass;
Jerusalem shall not rise again.
22
FIGURES
Fig. 1. Jean Fouquet. Detail
of the Virgin of Melun
(bust of Virgin). Koninklijk
Museum voor Schone
Kunsten, Antwerp,
Belgium. Credit: Scala /
Art Resource, NY.
Fig. 2. Nkondi tatu oath
taking figure (fetish figure).
19th CE. Yombe People,
Republic of Congo.
Ethnologisches Museum,
Staatliche Museen zu
Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
Credit: Bildarchiv
Preussischer Kulturbesitz /
Art Resource, NY.
Fig. 3. Dierec the Elder Bouts. Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus
with Saints Jerome and Bernard of Clairvaux. Ca. 1470.
St. Pierre, Louvain-Leuven, Belgium.
Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY.
Fig. 4. Giambattista Tiepolo.
The Martyrdom of Saint
Agatha. Ca. 1745-1750.
Gemaeldegalerie, Staatliche
Museen zu Berlin, Berlin,
Germany. Credit: Bildarchiv
Preussischer Kulturbesitz /
Art Resource, NY.
Fig. 5. Mathias Grunewald. Crucifixion. A panel from the
Isenheim Altar. Musee d'Unterlinden, Colmar, France.
Credit Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.
Fig. 6. Giovanni Bellini. St. Francis in the Desert. ca. 1480.
The Frick Collection, New York, NY. Copyright The Frick
Collection, New York.
Fig. 7. Pavel Tchelitchev. Hide and Seek (Cache-cache).
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. Credit: Digital
Image ©The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA /
Art Resource, NY.
Fig. 8. Morris Graves. Little-Known Bird of the Innter Eye. The Museum of
Modern Art, New York, NY. Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern
Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. By permission of the Morris
Graves Foundation.
Fig. 9. Pablo Picasso. Guernica. 1937. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina
Sofia, Madrid, Spain. Credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY. © 2007 Estate of
Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
on
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Fig. 10. Pablo Picasso. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. 1907. The Museum of
Modern Art, New York, NY. Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of
Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. © 2007 Estate of
Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
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